Abstract

Electro-active or electro-sensitive elastomers are 'smartmaterials', which are composed of a rubber-like basis material filled with electro-active particles, and as a result, their properties are able to change significantly by the application of electric fields. In this paper, we provide the theoretical basis of the non-linear properties for a special class of these materials, namely, the transversely isotropic electro-active elastomers, whose characteristic is that during the curing process, due to the presence of an external applied field, the electro-active particles are aligned in a preferred direction. The theory is applied to some boundary value problems. As well as this, a linear approximation is obtained from the general non-linear formulation, which is compared with the results of the classical theory for piezoelectric materials. © Springer-Verlag 2008.